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So this is how the story goes. In 1826 a London merchant decides to buy some cloth from a weaver in Hawick, a town in the Scottish borders famous for its cloth production. Very happy with his order, he decides to get some more but – crucially – misreads the weaver’s dashed handwriting. Instead of ‘twill’ this Londoner reads ‘tweed’, and assumes this new cloth must take after the River Tweed which runs fast and clear through the textile areas of lower Scotland. ‘Tweed’ and not ’twill’ has been the term used ever since.

Cataloguing the Museum’s collection of medieval pilgrim badges for Collections Online has been a great opportunity for me to look really closely at our objects and sometimes to find out that items are not at all what they appear to be. A great example recently has been a tiny little badge in the shape of a comb.

When I first started working at the Museum of London’s Archaeological Archive I was told there was a ghost in our metal store. More Casper than Blair Witch, the ghost allegedly helped you find objects that had been ‘misplaced’. Sadly, I’ve never seen this ghost, but with 200,000 boxes containing millions of fragments of London’s history, I think it fair to say the ghosts of London’s past sit on our shelves.

Happy St Patrick’s Day! In honour of the Feast of St Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, we thought we’d share with you a few of our favourite Ireland and St Patrick related objects from the museum’s collection. Read the full post

In my previous blogs, I told the story of Geoffrey II de Mandeville, a wealthy baron in the reign of King Stephen. During the years of the civil war both King Stephen and his enemy Empress Matilda end up giving Mandeville permission to build a new castle anywhere on his land, which stretched from Berkshire to Essex. Archaeologists think that castle may have been the one found at South Mimms in the 1960s. Read the full post